My fourth encounter with the brilliant but unsettling fiction of Rose Macaulay – the others so far being Crewe Train, The Towers of Trebizond, and The World My Wilderness.

Of these, The World My Wilderness was closest to being a “plausible” story; the others were decidedly surreal. One cannot apparently read Macaulay on complacent auto-pilot; she takes a straightforward narrative and gives it the occasional twist sideways, just enough to catch the reader off guard.

Un-credited poem, which I assume to be by Rose Macaulay herself, on frontispiece page.

Among other disconnects from reality on this latest addition to my small Macaulay collection, it was the mention of tigers in the Central American jungle that caused me my greatest bemusement. I could handle all of the other scenarios – the luxuriantly roccoco villa built upon an ancient Mayan temple/Spanish monastery, the sophisticated love lives of the family of English step-brothers, -sisters and cousins living lives of lazy pleasure financed by their older relations, the American con-man with his uncanny knowledge of hidden treasure and his bizarre plot to attain such – but the tigers threw me off my stride.

At first I thought they were merely hypothetical tigers, and that the man referencing them was harking back to years spent in India, but they popped up again (figuratively speaking), apparently as a threat as “real” as the stalking jaguars which lurk in the overgrown Guatemalan forest. Had to stop and do a bit of research, it bothered me so much, and no, there do not appear to be actual tigers endemic to this region of the world. Such a relief! – I thought not, but there was that tiny bit of niggling doubt…

Okay, I’m going off on a strange tangent. Well, perhaps rightly so. This is a rather odd and slightly unsatisfactory tale.

It starts off conventionally enough. This is what the back cover of my old Pan paperback says:

Staying with Relations is about a family who live in a baroque, Maya mansion in the heart of the Central American forest. A young woman novelist goes from England to visit her relatives in Guatemala. Theft, kidnapping and hunting for treasure left there long ago by Spanish priests occur. There is an earthquake; a girl is lost in the jungle while escaping from kidnappers; unexpected aspects of the characters of the dramatis personae emerge. Rose Macaulay has enjoyed in this book the three pleasures of relating adventures, describing exotic scenery, and writing about people…She wrote this book largely as compensation for not having, in a tour of Central America, reached Guatemala and seen its ancient temples buried in jungle…

Macaulay dips her pen deeply into the satirical ink well; she jabs away at herself as much as at her invented characters, being continually cutting about the phenomenon of the English woman novelist and her apparently universal habits. Well, the writer should know.

Once we get this sort of thing out of the way, the novel proceeds on its way detailing the adventures of the not particularly sympathetic cast of characters. Though Catherine-the-lady-novelist at first seems to be the main character, with the action viewed through her eyes, the point-of-view increasingly shifts until we realize, with something of a shock, that we don’t really know any of these people at all. And certainly not Catherine!

As Macaulay puts her puppets through their paces, one strains to see what her intent is; what is she really going on about? And I wish I could say that I figured this out for myself, but I must give credit elsewhere. It was a comment by Simon at Stuck in a Book , in a discussion of The World My Wilderness, that clicked on the light:

‘Reliable’ is just another word for ‘consistent’, really, and Macaulay does seem to write in a consistently dry, almost satirical style, pursuing a similar theme in each novel – albeit a theme so broad that she could have written two thousand novels and never needed to approach it from the same angle twice. It is dangerous to summarise thus (and others may have said this before me…) but I believe Macaulay’s broad theme across her novels is: ‘What does it mean to be civilised?’

Once one views the novel with this thought in mind, it all begins to make much more sense. Macaulay is continually discussing, both by the dialogue of her characters and her scene setting, the difference between the “barbarians” and the “civilized” folk. No conclusion is committed to, but the concept of “civilization” trumps all of the other scurryings to and fro which make up the conventional skeleton of the story.

I enjoyed this book as much as one can when one feels as if the author is speaking rather over one’s head. As a dramatic fiction it is as unnervingly just off normal in the same way as something like Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel The Loved One is, or his slyly funny Decline and Fall. (Though Waugh is rather more accessible, in my opinion; Macaulay can be downright obscure, giving her readers very little help at all.)

I should probably quit now, having not really talked about the plot or any of the details of the story, and digging myself deeper with every sentence into a situation which I am going to have a hard crawling back out of. A veritable tiger-pit of a post, as it were!

For those who are already Macaulay aficionados, Staying with Relations will be a most interesting read. But I wouldn’t start here for my first introduction to this unique novelist. Perhaps try Crewe Train instead; it is just as satirically twisted but there are less characters to keep track off, and a more clearly defined heroine. Who is also, now that I come to think of it, “staying with relations”…

10 Responses

Apropos of nothing, I do love the hellebores in your blog header. Towers of Trebizond really sort of wore me out. It took me two tries to get through it and I was glad I did ultimately. But I’m not up to working that hard to read a book lately. Sometimes I have to admit defeat and decide that a certain author just doesn’t float my literary boat. And I think old Rose is one of those. Although I did love aunt Dot….and the camel.

Towers of Trebizond *was* hard going – it took me two tries as well, and I ended up reading it in installments, as it were, spaced out with something not quite so intellectually demanding. But I ended up liking it very much indeed. I think I could safely say I “loved” both Crewe Train and The World My Wilderness.

This one, Staying with Relations, I’m a bit ambiguous about. The plot and setting were fairly bizarre; I was never quite sure whether the author was just fabricating authentic details as she went along (those troublesome tigers!) or if she actually *had* been to Central America. And as the jungle setting was crucial to vast chunks of the complicated plot, it mattered to me that the details on flora and fauna were plausible. I did enjoy the read, with those reservations – Macaulay is a fascinating writer, even if occasionally bemusing as she goes off on her own tangents.

Before giving up on Macaulay, do give Crewe Train a try. I’ve included a substantial excerpt on the review I wrote on it last year (I linked it above in the SWR post) and if you like that you’ll have no trouble at all with the book. The World My Wilderness is absolutely excellent as well and very easy to get into and through – and it is much more of a “conventional” sort of novel.

Crewe Train is on my to-read list, so I’m glad to have some broader author insights before eventually heading into that read. As for this one, that tiger bit definitely caught my attention. I’ve heard of writing a book after visiting a place, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of specifically writing a book after NOT visiting a place…Seems like a risky enterprise from the get-go.

The only one of hers I’ve read is The World My Wilderness, which I liked a lot. But I’ve been meaning to read more since I started to really warm to her after reading The Love Charm of Bombs, a multiple biography of writers in London in WW2, in which she figures. What an interesting woman, and what a sad life. I love the satirical tone of the things you quote, but I think I’ll give the Tigers a miss. Crewe Train is probably more up my street.

Do give Crewe Train a try! It is “odd” here and there as well, but in a most readable way. Thank you for mentioning The Love Charm of Bombs, by the way. That one came to my attention some time ago, but I never followed up on it. I think I will bump it up the must-find list, because I am increasingly intrigued by Macaulay and her fellow writers in that horribly eventful era.

Ha! I saw this title and thought, What? Tigers in Guatemala? How can THAT be? and then did my own googling to discern whether this was a real thing. But it’s all wasted effort on my part, as you say in your post that there are no tigers in Guatemala.

It has its moments, but it is decidedly surreal. Not one of Macaulay’s top notch efforts, to be sure. (She was quite incredibly prolific, wasn’t she? I keep running across mention of more and more of her titles, most of which I am sure I’ve never heard of before, aside from the standards like Trebizond and Crewe Train.)

Loved your analysis – it just went “click”. Thank you for that!

And yes, isn’t it odd to go back over our old postings? “Did I really write that? Hmmm, it’s quite good…” or sometimes maybe not so marvelous, lol. I recently came across some of my old high school essays, written when I was 16 years old. Oh my. I guess I always *did* tend to run on…some things have not changed!

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Rudbeckia in September.

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These “Reviews” and Ratings

I am merely a reader, a consumer of books for amusement and personal instruction, not a professional reviewer - and that is indeed a worthy profession, an important literary craft - so these posts are merely meant to be one person's reading responses, not scholarly reviews.

Early on in this blog I began rating the books I talked about on a 1 to 10 scale; it was meant to be a quick way to communicate my personal degree of satisfaction/pleasure (or the opposite) in each reading experience.

To emphasize: These are very personal, completely arbitrary ratings. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader.

5 & higher are what I consider as "keepers", in various degrees. A 10 indicates that I can think of no possible improvement. Ratings under 5 are rare & I struggle with giving those, but in all honesty sometimes feel them appropriate for, again, undeniably arbitrary and very personal reasons.

Each book is rated in its own context, NOT in comparison to the entire range of literature, which would, of course, be an impossible task.